Well, now that spring has sprung, June will be
here before you know it. April showers will bring May flowers, and May flowers will
bring pilgrims. But before that, March musings apparently bring rumblings and
grumbling of discontent about the USGA’s Pinehurst plan.

Many pilgrims will land at Pinehurst, NC, this
June for a bold experiment in golf promotion that will most certainly be a
one-off. Much like the Super Bowl experiment last month, having Men’s and
Women’s U.S. Opens back-to-back at the same venue seems like a nice
idea—in theory. In practice, the NFL’s decision to host a Super Bowl
outside in cold weather in the New York City metropolitan area made everyone
anxious about the realities of actual bad weather impacting the game, the fans,
and the three-ring circus that is Super Bowl week. And in practice, the USGA’s
decision to conjoin the Opens will have a similar effect.

Let’s just keep it simple here: The USGA wanted
to promote the women’s game, which is nice. I don’t question their intentions,
only whether they weighed the pros and cons as carefully as they might have.
Because the potential cons are many and variable and unpredictable.

First up is the negative publicity of having to
explain why the women go second. This really isn’t complicated, and shouldn’t
really be an issue, but a few LPGA players recently weighed in when Golf
Channel gave them a voice. Can you strike a balance between
cross-promotional "riding on coattails" while still "playing second fiddle"?
Probably. Fans know the score, more or less.

But the order of the tournaments is easy to
understand if you consider the culture of the USGA. They are bound to a good
degree by history, and the Men’s Open has always come first. Changing precedent
would open up a boatload of potential scheduling conflicts in future years with
both Tours.

Furthermore, the USGA is meticulous in course
preparation and setup, and the absolutely perfect execution of the Men’s U.S.
Open course setup is their white whale every year. Given the common differences
in the course setups between the two events, it would be impossible to go from
the Women’s U.S. Open setup to the Men’s in three days. While you can cut rough
and soften up the greens between the two tournaments, you can’t do the reverse.
Enough said?

Whether or not the fairways will be a minefield
of divot holes for the ladies is a valid concern. Knowing the obsessive attention
to detail of the USGA and executive director Mike Davis, though, I imagine that
most common "landing areas" will be different for the women come the second
week of competition on the course. There will, by necessity, be some overlap,
but wholesale turf patches of divot holes is not prohibitive to achieve, if you
have the resources of the USGA. Believe me, they’ve thought about this.

And they should have enough extra cash laying
around to re-sod all the landing areas, to be honest. Just imagine the
staggering amount of money the USGA will save by not having to tear down, ship,
and reinstall all of the grandstands, gates, fences, corporate tents, infrastructure,
etc. between the two Opens.

But I predict it will be a one-time only
experiment, nevertheless. Like the Super Bowl, the biggest X factor is the
weather, and bad weather would evoke completely justifiable ire from the ladies
of the LPGA. I’ve been on several major championship venues during rainy weeks,
and let me tell you, it’s not pretty.

More than the players, it’s the spectators who
wreak havoc on the course, the rough, and all the staging areas. It can make
playing the event a miserable slog of attrition. Even if the bad weather
doesn’t come, I believe the USGA will take future conjoined Opens off the table
after surviving all of the anxiety, hand-wringing, brow-beating, kvetching, and
bellyaching that they’re in store for. Once bitten, twice shy, as they say.

Part 2: In the next blog post here, I’ll
discuss one other critical potential "con" of this bold USGA experiment of
back-to-back Opens, and it concerns fans’ appreciation of the game as played by
professionals. It’s a lesson the pro tennis tour learned many moons ago, about
how to manage their sport from the fans backwards. After all, there is no
circus without the suckers who follow it, to criminally paraphrase P.T. Barnum.

Ron Romanik is
principal of the brand, packaging and PR consultancy Romanik
Communications (www.romanik.com), located
in Elverson, PA. His full bio is here.

You heard it here first: 2014 is going to be a
big year for Michelle Wie.

Like most golf fans, I was awed by the
Houdini-like escapes of Dubuisson at the Match Play
and the steely resolve of Jason Day. But, when I reviewed the Honda LPGA Thailand on my DVR later that same
night, I was more awed by the powerful, newly refined swing of Michelle Wie.

When I first saw Wie’s
new swing last week on a Golf Channel tournament preview ad, I thought: "Damn,
what has Leadbetter done to this poor girl now?" I
was perturbed because I loved watching the flowing swing of the 18-year-old Wie. It was balanced, rhythmic, flowing, and effortlessly powerful.

At first glance, I thought the new swing was too
jerky, too athletic, and too aggressive. It looked unnecessarily contrived,
requiring too much effort. And short. Her short- and mid-irons point to the sky
at the top, as you can see with the full 6-iron shot picture here, caught at
the top of a full swing. She does get nearer to parallel on the backswing with
her driver, though. You’ll also notice her stance is wider and she tilts her
spine angle quite deliberately at address.

But on closer review, I’m sold. When she
transitions to the downswing, every inch of her frame looks "connected" and
coiled for release. Leadbetter has Wie bombing it again with purpose, frequently over 300
yards on her drives.

I’m easily swayed by the evidence of results.
Her solo 4th finish moved her from 60th to 48th on the Rolex Ladies Rankings.
And the announcers gushed. (Sorry I couldn’t confirm their names. They sounded Australian,
in the nicest way.)

Female announcer: "She blows me away. I walked
around with her and I cannot believe the amount of carry she gets; the height
she hits it. It is just enormous."

Male announcer: "The line she took on No. 1 was
a line that I think only Michelle took. She can see parts of the course that
most of us can’t."

On the 10th hole, a par-five of 540 yards, Wie out-drove eventual winner Anna Nordqvist
by 95 yards and cut a high long-iron approach off a downhill lie to 10 feet. Not
surprisingly, she missed the eagle putt. Wie’s new
putting stance is a topic for another time, but even that part of her game is
coming around in measurable ways.

But it’s the new full swing that is
fascinating, and she seems to have supreme command over it. The announcers also
oohed and aahed over her three-wood tee
shots. Though her driver tee shots were towering, the announcers described Wie’s three-wood tee shots as almost impossibly low.
Intentionally and consistently low, like "stingers."

Who knew that the term "golf widow" was almost
100 years old? What’s more, who knew that there were so many reasons golf
widows should be happy for the time apart from their husbands, according to one
Rev. John B. Kelly.

According to Rev. Kelly, the moral benefits of
golf are many to men and subsequently, their wives. But don’t think he discouraged
wives from playing, mind you, for "The golfer whose wife is superior to him at
his own game is a very tractable spouse."

The Rev. Kelly’s praising of golf’s "effect on
the devotee’s soul" and its "effect of the spiritual benefits" is so effusive as
to make one wonder if the long essay/sermon was not slightly tongue-in-cheek.
After some careful consideration, I am quite sure it was not so.

The golf mania sweeping the nation at the time even
swept up doctors’ recommendations: "Physicians have urged the necessity of golf
so magnanimously as to find their preaching a detriment to their personal
incomes." This thesis-statement-in-disguise sums up the main thrust of the
essay, which is that golf invariably improves health, whether physical, mental,
or spiritual.

Since men made up the majority of golfers back
in the day, it is men’s moral well being that the Reverend focused on
primarily—and he saw nary a downside. Here’s just a few of the most
entertaining passages:

"Religion and golf work together in the making of a good man."

"Surely a man has more faith in the existence of a Supreme Being
after a day in the fairways of earth."

"Golf brings its devotees nearer to God."

"[Golf devotees] have an opportunity of coming into that intimate
contact with the beauty of creation which is a healing influence on the soul."

"Children of criminal habits have the countenances of old men, and
men of childish habits look half their age. In this respect golf is the
fountain of youth."

"A good Sunday should consist of about an hour in church and ten
hours on the fairways."

Other moral benefits include bonds of
brotherhood between men, the virtues of reverence and obedience, the avoidance
of vice, and a significant longer life, for which golf widows should be
grateful. And here is where the good Reverend may have drifted a little far
afield, presuming that wives, on average, want their husbands to survive into
their advanced years.

That minor point aside, it brings me pleasure
to imagine Rev. Kelly high in a pulpit in a spartan
church in the country, passionately extolling the virtues of golf: "Let those
who seek the waters of the fountain of youth drink from the wholesome springs
of thought that golf creates."

Can I get an "Amen!"?

Ron Romanik is
principal of the brand narrative, package design intelligence and PR consultancy
Romanik Communications (www.romanik.com), located in Elverson, PA. His
full bio is here.

Tis the season, so they say.
So let’s be thankful for the moments of good times with friends and family and
the good golf we’ve had this year. If we can remember any good golf, that is.

We should be thankful for
the ability to be thankful. As it turns out, gratitude may cause happiness more
than vice versa. (See the "Steindl-Rast" video below.)

Bah humbug, you say? Don’t
knock it until you try it. The causes and effects of things are frequently
mixed up by this linear, narrative English language we are willfully constrained
by.

I am grateful that I can
still knock a drive out there about 270, and I’m grateful that my handicap is
not higher than an 8. The relatively low handicap is more a factor of the few
rounds I got in this year than anything else, as a toddler has invaded my life,
for which I’m most grateful.

I, for one, am also grateful
that there was no Skins Game this past weekend. I found that exercise to be
tiresome, as the players always seemed to be trying too hard to joke around. It
was inauthentic, for lack of a better word.

A more interesting event
might be an old-school "One-Club
Challenge," such as was staged in 1984 at the Old Course at St. Andrews.
The YouTube highlights show Trevino and Ballesteros at their creative best,
working their way around the links with only a five-iron in hand (they all
chose the same club). They teamed up to trounce the team of Nick Faldo and Isao
Aoki for "The Epson Trophy." Good luck staging an event like that today. It’s
my guess that there would be few players that would risk embarrassing
themselves with poor-looking shots.

As
you might expect, Ballesteros was impressive. Many will recall that Seve started playing the game as a youth with only a
three-iron, knocking rocks around his back yard. Though Seve’s
deft touch around the greens was impressive, so were his rope-hook drives that
rolled out well past his fellow competitors. As YouTube user "stevepising" says: "If
the game was only played with one club, Seve would
have won 50 majors." Another commenter suggested, in detached objectivity, that
14 clubs did seem like an awful lot of tools for the game at hand. It’s hard to
argue against the fact that fewer clubs would require greater skill and
imagination, which are the true joys of the game.

I, for one, am grateful for
the Internet in all its aggravating glory, including both the polite comments
and the not-so-polite. You have to be grateful for the good and the bad. In
fact, it’s possible you wouldn’t know pleasure unless you’re reminded what pain
is from time to time.

Golf will happily supply
that pain whenever you have the time. Pain and pleasure are relative to each
other, as are varying levels of each. A wedge shot that stops more than 10 feet
from the flag brings a certain kind of pain to Tiger, so when he goes really
bad, it must feel like a dagger twisting into his heart. If you dare, empathize
with his pain in this video that compiles
the Top 10 of Tiger pain—and be thankful you’re not him.

But the best reason to be
thankful of the Internet is that thousands of YouTubing
apes will eventually, someday, ferret out the Hogan Secret that Ben never
revealed. And I think we’re finally getting close. (More on that in a future
post.)

Or, maybe the secret to the
correct swing tempo could be honed by watching and imitating this mesmerizing GIF. (Wait until the
GIF loads completely to see the full swing at the end.)

I am also grateful for the
Internet because it gives us a personality like Leonard Nimoy
in surprising candor. The best part about the former Mr. Spock is that he ends
all his online posts with "LLAP." If you don’t know what that stands for, ask
the nearest person to you—or, better yet, go to www.shopllap.com.

In a TED Talk by David Steindl-Rast titled Want to be happy? Be grateful., the Benedictine monk endorses "the gentle
power" of gratefulness, encouraging everyone to seek out opportunities for
gratefulness in the mundane events of every day and to "Stop...Look...Go."

And finally, a "Philadelphia
Boy," if you will, released a fascinating book this year called Give and Take. Adam Grant is a young
tenured professor at Philadelphia’s Wharton School at Penn (my alma mater). His
premise is that in professional interactions, most people are either "givers,"
"matchers," or "takers." One surprising finding that he elaborates on in the
book is the fate of givers in the business world. Although some "givers" get
taken advantage of and burn out, many become extraordinary successes in a
variety of industries.

So, this holiday season...
maybe we’d all be a little better off if we expected a little less, gave a
little more, and were a little more grateful for what we have.

Ron Romanik
is principal of the brand narrative, package design intelligence and PR consultancy
Romanik Communications (www.romanik.com), located in Elverson, PA. His
full bio is here.

There’s really no question that the biggest issue
in today’s golf industry is slow play. It just takes too much time out of any
day. Even sneaking out for nine holes often feels like a chore.

And the most frustrating part about the current
situation is that it is caused to a good degree by player attitudes that are
just plain wrong. One such attitude is that taking more time over a shot will
lead to a better result. In fact, the opposite is more likely true.

The more time you spend thinking about or standing
over a shot, the more likely you'll hit a bad shot. And it’s not even
"paralysis from analysis." It’s more a matter of tension in the muscles.
Keeping muscles moving and keeping your mind distracted prevent unnecessary
tensions in full swings as well as putts.

Exacerbating this behavior is the obsession
with score. In Great Britain and Ireland, there’s less of this obsession, and
play moves nicely along. A common match format is four ball, or better ball of
partners, where no one complains when they have to pick up because they’re "out
of the hole."

Sadly, outside of private clubs, in the U.S.
these player attitudes are unlikely to change for a long time. And it has a lot
to do with what they see Tour players do on TV. In writing this piece, I realized
that one of the reasons I like playing with honors, or first off the tee, is
that I jump up to the tee box ready to hit, stick the peg in the ground and
just go. It may also be why "ready golf" is so appealing to me—enough
that it’s a frequent first hole agreement, even in tournaments.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Lee
Trevino tried everything possible to keep tensions from constricting his golf
swing. He fidgeted, he talked, he waggled—whatever it took to stay loose.
In the prime of his career, he would even be replanting his feet moments before
a swing.

And the bigger the moment, the quicker he
played. He recounted his walk to the 18th tee on Sunday at Muirfield
in the dual with Jack for the 1972 Open Championship. He told his caddy to give
him the driver as fast as possible so he could load and fire before any doubts
could creep into his head.

So it is up against monumental inertial forces
that the USGA is trying to make a dent in round durations with several
concurrent campaigns trying to guilt players into speeding up play. It’s
impossible to say whether the "While We’re Young" commercials, while amusing,
will have any effect long-term. People are amazingly un-self-aware when it
comes to these things. Many slow players will watch those ads and think they’re
talking about someone else they know who is worse.

The USGA announced it will hold a symposium focusing solely on slow play this week. Some key figures in the industry will meet to discuss
new strategies and campaigns to cut down typical round times. Whatever you
think of the speed of USGA policy making, at least there’s some movement in the
right direction. If you’re bored, go to the USGA website to sign a pledge to be part of the solution,
not the problem. Nearly 175,000 have signed to date, including yours truly.

As reported by Golf Channel, Tiger heard about the symposium and commented that it’s a big problem during tournament play for threesomes and
for average golfers slogging around public courses. His practice rounds at Isleworth are a different story altogether. I imagine his souped up cart can top out close to 50 mph, because he claimed
he frequently gets in 36 holes in less than three hours, and sometimes finishes
18 in under one hour.

Faster than fast

Taking faster play to another level is Speedgolf. A
couple of weeks ago at Bandon Dunes in Oregon, Irishman Rob Hogan shot two
sub-80 rounds in about 40 minutes each to win the Speedgolf
World Championship. Combining golf with competitive distance running is
certainly not everyone’s cup of tea, but it is entertaining to watch nonetheless.

Earlier this year, I caught a special about the
2012 World Championship that was aired Masters weekend. That event was won by recent
Notre Dame grad Chris Walker, who has aspirations for a professional career.
This year, he finished 4th with rounds of 74 and 73, but both times were over
50 minutes.

The interesting part about scoring well under
the demanding conditions of Speedgolf is that you
have to do your best with four to six clubs. There’s no club limit per se in
the Speedgolf, but the weight of more clubs would cut
significantly into the top speed running down the fairway.

Other rules modifications to speed things along
include the option of leaving the flagstick in when putting and a lost ball
rule that would drive rules purists mad. When a ball is lost, the player has
the option, after a one-stroke penalty, of dropping anywhere along the line of
flight of the previous shot.

But there is a nice purity in the scoring
system. A player’s SGS (Speedgolf score) is simply a
total of strokes plus minutes. The current world record in Speedgolf
was established in October 2005 when Christopher Smith shot a five under par 65
in 44:06 for a Speedgolf score (SGS) of 109:06 at a
tournament in the Chicago Speedgolf Classic at
Jackson Park Golf Course.

Golf Channel did a great service to golf this
year in its Greatest Rounds series. One of the best was the Trevino/Nicklaus
dual at Merion for the 1971 U.S. Open. The broadcast was fascinating on many
levels, and I hope to finish a future blog about all the annotations I made.

One surprising part of the broadcast was the
amazing tediously slow play of one Jack Nicklaus. He was known as a slow
player, for sure, but it seemed he was attempting new personal bests (or
worsts) at Merion. In retrospect, I have to wonder if it wasn’t gamesmanship
aimed specifically at Trevino during the playoff round.

Trevino, to his credit, never pointed it out.
But there were some telling inset TV camera clips of Trevino watching Jack putt
from greenside. Fidgety as always, Lee looked perturbed and frustrated. And for
good reason, because I timed Jack. Several times, Jack would take 30 seconds after address before hitting a putt.
During that time, Jack would glance at the hole eight or nine times, maddeningly
lengthening the time between each successive glance, like Chinese water torture.

That rant aside, I’ll finish on a positive
note, observing that Lee Buck Trevino was also a pioneer in Speedgolf.
In preparing for Muirfield in 1972, Lee wanted to get
fit and trim and also hone his instinctual game. Good friend Orville Moody
found an out-of-the-way course in Texas where he could do this.

Camp Killeen opened at first light. The superintendent's daughter
drove Trevino's cart, and although she was deaf, she could read lips, and they
worked out a routine. Trevino would hit his shot, hand her the club, and sprint
to the ball, where she would be waiting with his clubs. Run. Point. Shoot.
Repeat. "She could understand me," Trevino says. "She became a
friend of the family, a friend of the kids—beautiful girl. I'd break into
a dead run between shots. I wouldn't jog. I'd run. That's where I got my exercise."

In a few years I can compete in the 50+
division of the Speedgolf Championship. This year’s
winner was David Harding of Oregon who carded a 89 in 54:11. That’s something
to shoot for.

Ron Romanik is
principal of the brand narrative, package design intelligence and PR consultancy
Romanik Communications (www.romanik.com), located in Elverson, PA. His full bio is here.

You know the THE BOOK. To
many, Hogan’s Five Lessons is the one
indispensible golf instruction book in existence—still. Fifty-six years
after its publication.

If you recheck your copy, I’d
bet many of you would find passages you underlined, notes you scribbled in the
margins, and question marks next to sections you intended to revisit later with
a clearer mind.

Ben Hogan’s seminal book
ushered in a whole new era of "position" swing theory and instruction. The
chapter on the grip may be the best and most thorough ever written on the
topic, but you may wonder how the waggle could warrant 4½ dedicated pages.

One of my contentions has
long been that parts of the book might not be entirely applicable for the
taller golfer. After all, the "wee ice mon" was only 5’6", with the compact
frame of a welterweight boxer and a flatter swing plane than most.

That point aside, many concepts
in the book resonate with readers for years and decades, while others leave even
teaching pros scratching their heads. If you’re anything like me, one of the
nagging contentions you might have with THE BOOK is its preoccupation with the
left side of the body at the exclusion, nearly, of the right side.

In Hogan’s lessons, the left
hand dominates the grip, the waggle sets the left wrist, the left arm pushes
the club away on the backswing, the left side keeps the club on plane, the left
hip starts the downswing, and the left wrist pronates, supinates... and
equivocates, for all I know.

Seeing is Believing

Admittedly, it’s pretty easy
to get sucked into the vortex of prognosticating swing-analysis videos on the
YouTube, and much of it is spurious. My own ADHD tendencies aside, I have
noticed a minor trend in the last few years. Many instructors are rediscovering
the wisdom of talking about the right side of the body, especially at the
beginning of the downswing.

Even Hogan himself, in a clip from 1963, unintentionally
hints at the how the right side falls into place at the beginning of the downswing,
albeit still only in relation to how the lower part of the body should ideally
move to initiate the downswing.

If you really want to go
down the rabbit hole of swing analysis, check out the bio-kinetic theories of Dariusz J.'s YT BioChannel on
YouTube. He seems to be a nice, obsessive fellow from Poland with an avocation
of theorizing about the mysterious forces behind Hogan’s magical swing. He also
has deep respect for many other great ball-strikers of days gone by, which he
chronicles in a series he calls Forgotten Great Theorists, both on
YouTube and on his own blog site.

Dariusz has a very
interesting interpretation and analysis of Hogan’s swing where he applies his Sagittal Plane Compression concept. That
video explains the optimal biometrics of a person swinging a golf club in a "macroscale."
Also not to be missed is a compilation video of the game’s greats starting the
downswing with the right side in optimal position, or what he calls the Early Elbow Plane position. This
position "...is a logical result of benefitting from one of the golden rules of
(bio)physics concerning the perpendicularity of the distal parts motion to the
spine (core)."

More Right Side Love

Teaching pro Kip Puterbaugh,
at the Aviara Golf Academy in Sunny Carlsbad, CA, makes his case for paying
attention to the right side of the body during the downswing, especially the right elbow.

Of course, if you want to
learn Hogan’s Five Lessons with a more attractive teacher, there’s always Kendra Vallone’s super smooth motion.
Blond, statuesque and certainly easy on the eyes, Kendra is nonetheless a
diligent, lifelong student of Hogan’s little book. She revisits Hogan’s
fundamentals with reverence, and her right-side positions at the start of the
downswing are a thing of beauty all their own.

My favorite passage in THE
BOOK still has to be the following, which must be as maddening for beginners
today as it was for me as a 15-year-old:

"Actually, the hands
start the clubhead back a split second before the arms start back. And the arms
begin their movement a split second before the shoulders begin to turn. As a
golfer acquires feel and rhythm through practice, the hands arms and shoulders
will instinctively tie in on this split-second schedule."

As crazy as this sounds, and
as difficult as it would be to copy as a beginner, I invite you to www.pgatour.com, where they have dozens of
the top touring pros captured in super-slow-motion video of driver swings. Look
closely at Tiger’s
and Adam
Scott’s swings, and tell me Hogan hasn’t been right all along about the
split-second hands/arms/shoulders takeaway sequence.

If you’ve been living under
a rock this summer, you’ve missed the emergence of an amazing talent out of
Pennsylvania. Brandon Matthews, a sophomore at Temple University, has had an
incredible run. Watch this tournament
roundup to witness the blur of his powerful swing—at :33 and 1:20.

If you still haven’t had
enough of Hogan, here’s one opinion
of how Hogan and Moe Norman might have shared a "move" at the start of the
downswing. And I couldn’t leave you without sharing the beautiful right side motion
of Jack Nicklaus at age 15.
Hope your Fall is full of good viewing, good swinging and good scores!

Ron Romanik is principal of
the brand narrative, packaging intelligence and PR consultancy Romanik
Communications (www.romanik.com), located
in Elverson, PA. His full bio is here.

From the media rumblings
about Scott this past week, I had thought we had another Stephen Ames incident
on our hands.

There have been more than a
few times in Tiger’s career when some pretender spoke out of line about Tiger’s
abilities, then quickly paid the consequence. Most dramatically was when
Stephen Ames suggested Tiger’s erratic driver was making him vulnerable in
Match Play. The venue was 2006 World Match Play Championship at La Costa. The
day before Tiger and Ames squared off in the first day of matches, Ames
casually said: "Anything can happen, especially where [Tiger's] hitting the
ball." The next day, Tiger dismissed Ames 9 and 8. (A virtual shutout, as the
only more lopsided score possible is 10 and 8.)

Tiger even admitted that
Ames’ comment motivated him, with a smile and nod, though his only comment
about it was: "Nine and eight."

So, before The Barclays,
Adam Scott was asked: "Would you rather have your season or Tiger's, and do you
think Tiger would rather have his or yours?" Adam replied with a smile: "I'd
rather have mine, that's for sure. I really don't know. He may want mine."

Did he know he was lighting
a fire under El Tigre? Did he dare have the arrogance to compare himself to
Tiger?

The truth of the matter is a
lot less dramatic if you look at the rest of the
interview transcript. As most golf fans know, Adam is a mostly humble man.
Earlier in the same interview, he was asked: "Who would you say has had the
best year on the Tour so far?"

Adam replied flatly: "Tiger.
Five wins? Has he won five times? Tiger's had the best year." And, to another
question about the criteria for Player of the Year, Adam said: "I don't think
one major makes up for five tournaments."

Adam’s comment about Tiger
wanting Adam’s year was specifically about Tiger’s top priority of winning 19
majors, and Adam’s season would have given Tiger No. 15, and he’d be one step
closer.

Either way, Adam’s comment
couldn’t have been better for setting up a little rivalry going into the FedEx
Playoffs, especially how the Barclay’s finished up Sunday, with Woods fighting
to the last putt.

The media will over-hype the
rivalry, as it always does, and that’s fine. But that doesn’t mean you should
discount the fiery motivation that Tiger will use to shrug off another
pretender to the throne. If his back doesn’t literally fall out of his body, I
think Tiger’s a safe bet to take the FedEx Cup and Player of the Year.

Which brings us to another
topic: Tiger’s perennial health problems. I remember announcers like Johnny
Miller and Curtis Strange doing the slow motion analysis of Tiger’s swing in
his prime and just being dumbfounded at how fast his hips turned ahead of his
shoulders. The speed and the timing that the speed required were otherworldly
to them. The announcers wondered over and over: "How long can his body could
take that torque?"

Well, as it turns out, not
so long after all. Because Tiger often disappears from media view when dealing with
a medical problem, it’s easy to forget how many different issues he has dealt
with in his career. Again, courtesy of Golf.com, we have a
litany of his injuries/surgeries over the years. It’s getting pretty long.

And if Tiger’s current
troubles were really triggered by a hotel mattress, as he claims, those old
rumors of Tiger installing his own furniture in every house he rented during
tournaments will be coming back.

Ron Romanik
is principal of the brand narrative, packaging intelligence and PR consultancy Romanik Communications (www.romanik.com),
located in Elverson, PA. His full bio is here.